Design principles for the (System)CSP software framework

Concurrency is one of the most essential properties of the reality as we know it. We can perceive that in every complex system, many activities are taking place simultaneously. Better control over the concurrency structure, should therefore automatically reduce the problem of complexity handling. Thus, a structured way to deal with concurrency is needed. According to [1] “CSP was designed to be a notation and theory for describing and analyzing systems whose primary interest arises from the ways in which different components interact”. CSP is a relevant parallel programming model and this design specification method aims to foster its utilization in practice of component-based design. CSP has found its practical implementation in occam programming language. But occam was tied to specific computer platform (transputer) and when that platform was suppressed by others, so was the occam. However, principles of occam were recognized as useful. As a result two different approaches emerged: creating occam-compilers for modern operating system platforms [2] and using modern programming languages to implement libraries that introduce API that maps directly to the syntax of occam programming language and allow in that way the usage of occam-like design approach. The main occam-like librairies are JCSP [3],developed in Kent, and CT libraries[4, 5] developed in our lab. Both approaches rely on OOP principles to implement API that mimics the syntax of occam.